


(They Say It Takes) 200 Hours

by althoughsolemn (Figure_of_Dismay)



Category: Top Gear (UK) RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Episode: Top Gear Polar Special, Huddling For Warmth, M/M, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2020-10-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 07:14:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27149933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Figure_of_Dismay/pseuds/althoughsolemn
Summary: The first in a 3 fic series set around a fanon verse centered around the polar special (this one), the botswana special (the sequel) and the vietnam special (the conclusion).This is a tale of emotional codependency, or, things begun in the arctic.(now re-edited on Oct. 23, 2020 to remove an appalling number of typos. I thank you for your forbearance with the rougher version.)
Relationships: Jeremy Clarkson/James May
Comments: 3
Kudos: 18





	(They Say It Takes) 200 Hours

**Author's Note:**

> How do I even summarize my situation here? last year I started writing a trilogy of fics with the first three grand adventure specials as my signposts, the first and most insistent to be written being this one set in & around the Polar Special. I finished drafting it at the beginning of last December. I was about 2/3rds of the way through the second fic, set around S10 filming and the Bostwana Special, when March and 'Unprecedented Times' started and my whole writing process got derailed. (also a detour back to Endeavour fandom.) I'm finally on top transcribing my drafts and feel ready to continue the sequel so I feel like it's safe to post this first chapter (of 3, with the other 2 to follow as I get them polished up).
> 
> I'm nervous about it though, I feel like I've been hoarding this for ages. And it is very much indulgent in terms of fanon characterization choices and story direction. I really hope someone out there enjoys this, or at least tells me what they think.
> 
> Content note: does contain multiple references to the crash in september '06, but in an 'they were all still dealing with the emotional fall out' way. Hopefully this is tasteful, rather than gratuitous.

It started, probably, with that weekend of going up and down a mountainside in Norway. Maybe that was only where he first noticed it, and it had been ongoing for a while, but in a way it was the noticing that mattered most. James hated heights. He really hated them. A lot about that week was extraordinary fun and truly wonderful. However the slow-grinding electric dread of going up and down that ski jump, on those awful slippy metal stairs, with a beautiful, horrifying sheer drop of a mountainside vista as a background to the proceedings. 

He didn’t exactly admit it, all he said was a wryly self deprecating, “You know, I’m not actually so fond of heights.” He hoped that it would work as both an explanation for his tetchiness and a final word on the subject -- an excuse not to talk about how genuinely he was alarmed by it. And it did, mostly. But it did somehow also meant that every time it was remotely feasible Jeremy went up with him on those stairs, right behind him, a bulky, unbotherable shape, blotting out the view down ‘accidentally,’ and also ‘accidentally’ acting as a barrier in case Jame’s usual poor traction issues got him and he started slipping backwards. Jeremy didn’t even make the mistake of mentioning that that’s what he was doing, which was a surprising level of delicacy considering who he was and why he was infamous. And going back down, which was worse for reasons James had never been able to understand, he walked in front of him, so that James could simply focus on the well-bundled bulk of his shoulders ahead, or the slow plodding of his heels, not the whole staggering vista of the mountainside. He knew that Jeremy’s long legs and generally undauntable temperament meant that he could have gone haring off away before James had even managed to mentally brace himself for the first steps, but instead, he stuck close, pretending that he wasn’t practically holding his hand, or doing anything out of the ordinary. He was casually placing himself as a pleasantly obstructive object to buffer James, when he could, from the most distractingly terrifying part of spending a weekend up a mountain, while pretending that that wasn’t obviously what he was doing.

It was an easy coping mechanism to learn. He’d already been using half measures of it when he was having a nervous day in the studio -- which he still had from time to time as he realized and realized again that it wasn’t just 40 anoraks and their bored girlfriends turning up anymore. It could be a different kind of nerve wracking on the road, too, and it took getting dropped into some of the worst of it before he noticed just how deeply that habit had burrowed in, looking at Jeremy trundling along, alternately being annoyed with him and trying to entertain him, win him over, earn that big, absorbed, genuine grin which meant that he had forgotten about the cameras and the character just for a few seconds and was just enjoying himself. It turned out that fighting with him or making him laugh were the two most distracting activities to be found on their more extreme endeavours, and James was happy enough to have something to focus on during these not-designed-for-his-sensibilities adventures that it took what would later feel like a stupidly long time before he have any thought to why that might be. What that might connect to. Just exactly what his subconscious was trying to tell him.

The silly weekend up a ski jump wasn’t much of a beginning. Not a shift in dynamic or a sea change, just an early seed, set without his noticing. The real shift came in that strange, horrible yet triumphant year, during which, between nearly getting stoned or shot in Alabama, getting drunk and moderately embarrassed in France, and of course the crash and Richard’s astonishing recovery, and then bookended by the Polar trip that nearly broke them all, there had been stretches when he of ran the full gamut of human emotion on a daily basis. 

Nothing that he and Clarkson went through after the crash, from the outside looking in, could compare with Richard’s extraordinary ordeal. Yet there was a particular sting to being a bedside observer that even the patient, submerged in trauma and the slow climb out, could not entirely know. The helplessness of it, the fear, each of them looking to the other, unknowing and refusing or unable to say it. And for James there had been the additional spine of guilt, the little nagging voice that reminded him from time to time that at first they’d wanted him to take the ride -- how perfect the joke, Captain Slow taking a run at the land speed record, how perfect, how absurd. He’d managed to have commitments, real ones but ones that could have been rearranged if he’d really wanted, if he hadn’t been glad of the excuse. When he asked, with quiet and shamed curiosity, what would have become of him, he’d been informed that as he was half a head taller, there was every likelihood that he’d have been brutally but quickly killed, which was a thought that haunted him some nights, despite his intentions to count as blessings the few things which had worked in Hammond’s favour and move on. He refused to think through all the eventualities of that with squeamish dread, though a morbid part of him could probably guess, the dispersal of his bikes and his little collections, the brief and half finished summaries of his life that would be made. It seemed shameful even to worry about his own mortality, and his not quite brush with it given what Richard was going through in actuality, but he'd still been uncomfortably compelled to think it out, just a time or two, in order to be done with the gut sinking leading edge of the thought, so he wouldn't keep tripping over it in odd moments. Mostly, that had worked, but less thoroughly and more guiltily than he'd hoped. 

The prodding point of that thought, that in a way he'd had his own brush with mortality, was a big part of what sped him on with the Polar trip. He could have refused outright and it would have been a bit awkward and they would have made fun of him on the special, obligatory pisstaking of the one who wasn't there, but it really would have been fine. No one would have blamed him, it wasn't his sort of thing, nor was it his contest. But he'd never seriously considered saying no. 

While it was true that he didn't honestly believe in pushing yourself to your limits just to see what they are -- he was fairly certain that he already knew what his were, and they weren't impressive -- this time there was good reason. Or something almost like it. James had been reminded that he wasn't immortal and been fearful, Richard had been genuinely hurt and was trying to remember how to be himself after his trauma, and Jeremy had been trying to shepherd them all through this rocky time workout losing the show, any of them, or his sanity, and despite reasonable success on most fronts the fact that he couldn't mend his friends through willpower alone had left him perceptibly strained and restless. They all three had something to prove, to themselves and to the world that continued to obsess over their misfortune. That they weren't daunted. That they could all go on being mad idiots, who always came out alright in the end. That they hadn't been scared back into the straight and narrow, where they always should have been in the first place, no better than they ought to be. And they'd mutually, tacitly agreed that they wanted to conquer something that was as far from a hospital recovery facility as could be found on the face of the earth, which the North Pole answered that exactly. 

The sanity of it was questionable, James was acutely aware. But none of them were denying that, in some ways that was the point. Besides, Jeremy had fixed on it, with Andy's blessing, and nobody yet had found a way to stop him once he'd determined to make something happen. Andy wasn't trying to temper it, either. Somehow he'd gotten pulled into the madness, seeing the potential for spectacle and absurdity, and maybe real triumph. He was pushing for a truly staggering budget and promising the BBC and every contact they'd made that they knew what they were doing, even though it had to be clear to everyone that they really didn't. Miraculously, it all plowed ahead, taking on a peculiar momentum. Questions like 'what the hell are we doing and why?' had fallen away early on, replaced with one's like 'what are all the ways we could die doing this?' and 'what will the world say if we actually make it?' Even James was swayed by the lure of that last one. 

The choice of team was easy, too, when they sat down and talked about it. He was possibly too large for a dog sled and hopeless on skis, low traction environments full stop, really, but adding skis would have been deadly. Besides, Jez would need a navigator, even though that was something of an irony -- captain sense of direction in charge of the map? -- but more than that he'd need someone to keep him sane in the ice fields. Despite how they played the antagonism of their characters, he had a lot of unplanned but necessary experience with that, as the two of them got each other through weeks of hospital visits after the crash. Of course he was going in the comparable luxury of the ridiculous red truck. 

Nevermind that he and Jeremy had never spent that much uninterrupted time together before. Nevermind that their friendship had always been more complicated, more tumultuous, for reasons he'd never quite seen. That there'd been a reason that they'd never spent that much time together without at least Hammond to fill out the comfortable, casual familiarity. The sense of danger, of live and sparking electricity that could go well or badly for them was another thing he'd known but always left unacknowledged and unexamined. 

That was a good word for everything about Jeremy, unexamined. And the fact was that they’d probably all be better off if it stayed that way and the precious golden goose of the dynamic stayed undisturbed. On the other hand, signing yourself up for an arctic trip, only provisionally not-alone together, that seemed like a fairly bold way to either force their hand to finally figure out how to communicate or to come out the other side of it not speaking at all. Perhaps never speaking again. Their expert had warned them that the ice bred hate, and James worried that that was a real possibility. 

Except as it turned out, they didn’t die, or murder each other. He didn’t have a full blown panic attack on or off camera. He didn’t even discover some heretofore unknown trait or habit of Jeremy’s to shock him into unexpected fury or hatred, and it didn’t seem like Jeremy had found any new ones in him. It wasn’t even, as those hospital days would tell him, an unknown thing to see each other unhappy and in distress. But then, those awful days of worry had involved many, many breaks from each other. Out on the ice, wandering off on your own to think and get yourself under control simply wasn’t an option. it would be an invitation to frostbite, and predators, and even so you might get followed by a cameraman, who wouldn’t be best pleased by the inherent risk but nevertheless had instincts too well trained to let them go unobserved. 

*

There is a kind of forced tolerance that forms, he learned, a kind of acclimation to stimulus. Whether that stimulus was bitter cold, or facing each other at all hours in all states of buoyancy or fear and unhappiness. There was a sense of shared — something, he didn’t have a word for it, like community, but nearer, or if community could be two men in a big red truck. It was claustrophobic but it wasn’t, a startlingly concrete sense of being a unit in a more boundaryless and thoughtless way than had ever seemed apparent or possible back on planet earth with their previous struggles, or projects for the show. 

And it did, bizarrely, or maybe intuitively, feel like a different planet. Jeremy said so himself, looking at the unbelievable, impossible stretch of sky, pink and orange and strangely pearlescent, reflective, like a vast lens into an uncanny place. 

Nine people, three trucks, four tents, a handful of cameras, like a pioneering band of explorers on an alien planet. For an afternoon Jeremy abandoned his usual method of viewing them all through the world of A.A. Milne and called himself Kirk, and him Spock. That was back when they still had the energy to joke with each other. It didn’t make it into the edit, too personal, too harmonious, too copyright-questionable, but James liked that afternoon. Despite their onscreen personas, they were both sci-fi nerds, in a tertiary kind of way, and he liked the joke, even though it leaned again on the old trope of supposed emotional stuntedness — except that it didn’t. It would if they were mugging for the camera but they weren’t. Instead the joke was that Jeremy was acknowledging him as the clever one and himself as the reckless one who happened to chew the scenery a fair portion of the time. Mostly always. It was funny because they were breaking new ground, and it was extraordinary and exciting.

But then they got deeper and deeper in, further and further from home, and the sun never stopped and the cold never stopped, and neither of them could sleep. 

James lay awake wondering if the crew was faring better. The icelandic ice specialists sure seemed to be. But he and Jeremy were a couple of pampered tv presenters who had made Londond their mostly-home out of a love of mod cons and comfortable habits. He’d been just as gungho as anyone to go and do this, in order to prove that they could all be more than comfortably frivolous, but here they were, on the sea ice, and he was worrying that what he was learning that they couldn’t be. That he couldn’t be, anyway. Not the kind of thing you wanted to learn about yourself at this late state and in this kind of place. 

After the first couple of days they started wearing down. No one had any energy for playing luxury explorers, or space-rover-away-mission anymore. The four familiar camera guys with their cameras and gear started to seem to transform from guys they’d spent time with over drinks at home in england and during their icelandic training camp into unfamiliar, terse parka’d and goggled vultures waiting to catch and record their every misstep and outburst of temper. The blustery comedy bicker and snipe as called for the characters “Clarkson” and “May” was giving way to real terseness and snap and a strange maudeline intensity, with awkward, apologetic dismissals in the quiet spaces afterwards, and nervous glances. 

And then there was the way James found himself mapping and remapping the shape of Jeremy beside him, bulky, determined, the thoughtless motions of his big hands, his increasingly slumped and constrained posture as exhaustion set in. Supplying him with cupfulls of coffee from the thermos took on a peculiar sense of needful reassurance and duty, even as his coffee slurping ways and snuffly throat clearing in the cold twanged increasingly on his nerves. Though even that familiar irritation took on an itching dual edged quality, the inner refrain that Jeremy’s annoying but he’s there and he was keeping them struggling onwards. James could see, out here, that there was no one else James would contemplate going to the arctic for, even if he couldn't entirely believe he'd done it in the first place. 

That was another strange effect, the mirror sense of mounting annoyance, frustrations, maybe even outright outrage, but also increasing insistence. Dependence. A fidgety need to appease and amuse, be approved of in return. It didn’t feel particularly rational or proportionate, but then nothing did. The entire world was snow and sky and the growl of the engine and the buffet of the wind when they stepped out into it. That you could be so violently annoyed by someone and, by the same person, so bone-vibratingly worried about, and eager for him to stand between him in the fear, the sheer drop of the mountain, falling away in front of them and bouey him out of it. 

He was used to looking at Jeremy in a difficult situation. As odd as it was to anyone who didn’t know the man behind the persona, James was used to looking at him as a barometer for when he should really worry. For if he was being paranoid and sensitive, or irrationally picky. He looked at his big, expressive face for the frozen look of unease under the smug persona mask. He looked for the frown breaking through and setting up steady frontage there and corrupting his liveliness, charisma not exactly diminishing but being shuffled into a different shape. He’d watched for those signs in the weather, in the states of Jeremy in the antiseptic halls of the hospital. He’d known to worry then, and then he’d known to be hopeful going by the pressure gauge of Jeremy, and Mindy in combination with Jeremy. 

His own internal meters had a tendency to go wrong, to ping outrageously high or to fail to register the danger or the potential disaster, and when it came to the reality they lived in for the show, he looked to Jez instead. Maybe he should be more worried about how much the show world was bleeding over into his supposed real life but that real, regular life was far, far away and he couldn’t bring himself to care about it in the midst of the ice, when he couldn’t fall asleep without trying to dodge the thought that he might freeze before he woke. So he didn’t worry about what it meant. He just watched. Watched Jeremy get increasingly exhausted and clumsy and frustrated and impulsive, watched him get frightened, watched him get angry at James for reasons he couldn't really understand. He didn’t always understand why people got mad at him, but this seemed to make even less sense than usual, when he was trying his best to cope with an impossible situation, and Jeremy had to know that, he had to. Surely he had been clear about how far from his comfort zone or area of ability this all was. 

It was amazing in a way, that they had the energy to argue at all. James didn’t like the idea that the effort of not arguing was what he was too tired to maintain. He didn’t like to think that he was that much of a miserable, vicious kind of bastard when provoked. Even when not very fairly provoked. Even when intellectually he knew that they were all struggling, the crew, too, getting short tempered and nervous with them and with each other, though they’d been brought onboard for their skill and their nerve -- bbc camera crews were made of sterner stuff than the sheltered, overpaid presenters, he’d always known that, but he’d never before seen it so comprehensively demonstrated. No one was as ill equipped to cope, on paper, than Jeremy and he was floundering, noticeably and maybe even pitifully, but that was, it turned out, the worst part of all of it, because Jeremy was an out of shape oaf with a bad back and famously poor fine motor skills and attention span, yet he was working like a dog and keeping his chin up and keeping them moving foreward while he, James, was falling more and more obviously into a kind of ugly, petulant, incapable emotional state and doing it in a place where there was no way to hide it or distract from it under the watching eyes of the cameras. 

And then there was the other way it made him feel wrong, off. Scared and off kilter; Jeremy was struggling. He was scared and tired just like he was, and James didn’t like it. He was used to thinking, well, no matter what kind of fools we look in the end, Jezza will fix it so that it’s funny, not sad. So that no one’s really in trouble, or in danger -- save for that one unpreventable or foreseeable time -- or in despair. Jeremy’s confidence was indestructible, James had always thought. But the ice was wearing him down, too, the wind, the midnight sun. James would be ashamed of himself later, but in those worst few days, in the middle, James had realized that he’d never wanted to know that Jez could be just as unhinged, could be just as scared as James could, in need of just as much comfort and care, if not more, given he was so used to needing or accepting it from his friends. James didn’t cope well with the unsettled feeling this insight gave him. He wouldn't be proud of it later, but it was undeniably true. 

*

Night four, if you could call it that in the endless light, was the first truly serious argument. It started out as character-bickering for the looming shapes of the camera guys and their rigs but it flipped sideways in the buffett of the stabbing spray of ice blowing into his face and the wrestling match with the flapping sail of the tent -- the instructor’s voice ringing in his ears saying that if they lost their tend they were dead. All he could focus on was the electric wire of anger that Jeremy had dragged him out there and had proceeded to continue his character and genuine incompetence, where it could get them actually, not in character, killed. He’d shouted and couldn’t even remember what he’d said later. He’d shouted furiously enough for it to be loud over the wind, for his throat to hurt, and to leave him light headed. He shouted until Jez seemed to crumple in on himself in that way that meant something was really getting to him though he tried not to show it, and then James had stomped off, unable to stand the sight of him anymore. 

The crew would help Jeremy with the tent, or the icelandic explorers would. That was what they were there for, emergency help when the two of them inevitably failed to measure up. Anything was better than standing and shouting and feeling his mind snap under what felt like the enormous force of two hands taking his nerves and twisting them in two. He wondered in a foggy corner of his mind, looking on, if in fact the two hands were his own, in self destructive stupidity. 

Storming away didn’t last for long. There was nowhere to go and he was too scared to wander off far, though even he would struggle to get lost as long as he kept at least one of the trucks in sight. Stumping through the snow used what little energy he had and before long he circled back to the Hilux. He sat sideways on the passenger seat with the door open, out of the wind or partly, byt at least he could tell himself that he wasn’t truly hiding. Hiding or not, he was still surprised, unpleasantly startled, like a child who had thought that shielding his face was enough to make the world leave him alone, when one of the Icelanders came up to him. Aksel or Emil, he wasn’t sure which, both were pale eyed and ruddy cheeked with broad, nordic features -- one had darker hair than the other, and a sharper chin, but they were all muffled with fleece neck gaiters and fur-lined hoods. This one had pulled his goggles down so at least James could read the upper half of his face. He looked stern, and perhaps grudgingly sympathetic. Not angry, though, which was a relief after the last few days. Their instructor had been angry the entire time he’d been set to teach them, which had made James antsy and forgetful. Then the instructor had washed his hands of them, advised them not to go by reason of their fatal lackadaisicalness, and had revoked his permission for the use of his face on screen. James didn’t think he could take any more competent people being angry at him for his inability after everything else. 

“The tent is set up,” said Aksel or Emil, “You need to get rest now, you and your friend. The sun and the adrenaline will try to trick you but you need food and you need rest to keep going.”

“The fact that you came over here to tell me that instead of him makes me think I should wait a little longer. Give him some more space.”

“He is upset. Amd busy setting up camp. He sent me to see if you had cooled off. Have you cooled off?” said Emil-Aksel pointedly.

James laughed dryly to himself at the unbelievable irony of the idiom in this context. Thinking back to how he’d behaved before, he felt sick with regret, or shame or realization like waking up from a nightmare or a manic episode. 

“Jezza’s upset?” he asked, thinking again and wondering.

“Yes. And so are you. Emotions run high on the ice, no reason to be ashamed of it, just remember that the cold and the not much sleep makes things seem bigger. Feelings, upset gets to feel… enlarged. You might say and do things you don’t mean. Emil and I, even, the first time on the ice together we nearly killed each other. And then felt so stupid after. But then we knew what to expect and not to pretend it couldn’t happen to us, and that made it better next time.”

“I don’t think we’ll be doing this again,” said James, sullen and hearing what apparently-Aksel was saying but not enjoying the message. The sooner they could accept that they couldn’t stoically, laddishly, nonchalantly endure with measured comedy banter, the sooner they could get on with enduring the indignity of it, or the insanity of it, which was the way it was starting to veer,

“Maybe you won’t, but even right now you need to understand. Everything… everything is amplified, yes? You know that the little things can kill you, so they also start to feel like killing over, yes? Like the end of the world. But they’re not, even up here. It is good to shout a bit and cry a bit, and maybe shout some more, that’s good for the team healthiness, too. And then you remember, oh I’m just cold and tired. Then you say sorry, that was stupid, I didn’t mean it, and move on,” said Aksel, insistently trying to catch his gaze, “You understand?”

James bristled under the lecture and the implied command that he apologize -- even though he already felt heavy with the idea of a visibly, publicly upset Jeremy. But he nodded obediently, trying to trust the expert and encourage him to move on. “I think so.”

“Good. It’s not the teams that make the little mistakes or fight that break up. All teams do those things sometimes. The ones that fall apart and really hate each other, maybe fail, are the ones that keep lists in mind of all the mistakes and don’t forget them, and try to put them on each other, so they keep digging in instead of moving forward.”

“Right. I see.”

“Good. Now go help your friend. Emil and I have to check on the rest of your group.”

**

So he went back, shutting up the Hilux for the night and trying to mentally prepare for the dual possibilities of being shouted at or ignored. For maybe even apologizing and then having to wait to see if it would be blokeishly brushed off or if it would merely remind Jeremy that he was annoyed with him. What he wasn’t mentally prepared for was crawling into the tent and discovering that Jez was trudging bleakly and slowly through setting up the tent furnishings, camp pads out and their sleeping bags, yet to be unrolled, on top of them, the stupid little table already up and one of the camp stoves already going as he mechanically pumped up the other one. 

He was hunched in a way that seemed to be more deflated and stiff than simply the posture of a tall man in a small tent. And he was snuffling and clearing his throat periodically in a way that might or might not be the usual recently thawed nose. Upset, Aksel had said. Because James had shouted at him, disproportionately, like a lunatic, an extremity he hadn’t enjoyed. But not that upset surely, even the North couldn’t drive him that far out of character. 

James hesitated inside the zippered up entrance of the tent. It wasn’t an environment conducive to giving each other space, but it didn’t feel right to just dive in either. 

“Get your boots off, May. You’ll get ice all over the tent,” instructed Jeremy in a crisp voice, without more than glancing at him.

Oh, he thought, that Jeremy. The one who waffled between commanding, concerned and condescending because he’d decided that James was worrisome, hapless May, who must be endured and sheparded along. There were times when he was faced with a lot of unfamiliar people and chaos and in very particular kinds of uncertain and generous moods, he did appreciate it. But the rest of the time, it rankled. He’d always been the slightly odd one, the one regarded as childish or backwards in some way. James had leaned into it, with fervour, even happily these days, but he also hoped that his friends, or near friend colleagues, as they had decided they ought to be in the public eye, would be able to see that he was in actuality able to look after himself. The signs of dismissal or condescension were the social cues he was singularly hypersensitized to and it could rile him like nothing else. 

Jeremy knew it could get to him, got him wound up and sharp and defensively snappish. Most of the time -- some of the time -- he didn’t do it on purpose, James was rationally willing to see that when this particular spur of contention came around. But sometimes, when things were going badly, and James had managed to misjudge their usual brand of rough and tumble banter and tripped over one of Jeremy’s real insecurities, rare and partially obscured though they were, and had made him feel genuinely small and scorned, Jeremy would pay James back in this particular way. James didn’t even think it was necessarily a conscious tactic, but Jeremy’s peculiar instinct for puppet mastery coming to the fore. Tit for tat, I feel small and slighted so I’m going to hit this button that I instinctively know makes you go rigid and flinching, that makes you feel like an outsider, and small yourself, so then at least we’re even. The worst part is that he knew that Jeremy wasn’t cruel enough, or enough of a genuinely subtle manipulator to think of condescension as strategy. It was merely footwork in the ring, it was the actualization of a flinch of his own. 

The other worse part was that even knowing this, James had never been able to prevent it getting to him. It always stung, every time. And when stung it was almost impossible not to dig in further and try to sting back. 

He bit down on the urge to snarl back, reminding himself of his current guilt. He did as he was asked instead. The laces were wet, unpleasant and clotted with ice. It still seemed ridiculous to pretend the tent was enough more warm than the outside to take off layers, but he’d been told things about circulation and making sure his extremities still thawed. Then he ate up some more stalling time by digging the nerdy, nylony down-insulated tent slippers that Sarah had given him before setting off, with instruction to not get frostbite. They were slippery and vaguely embarrassing since they were very purple and a bit like michelin man booties, but he genuinely did not want frostbite and it gave him at least a nostalgic recollection of the last time his feet had been properly warm, at home, sitting on his own sofa, unwrapping them after enjoying his sendoff dinner with her. He managed to drag out this activity for long enough that Jeremy seemed to be running out of shuffling around to do with his back determinedly turned, but he still hadn’t looked at James once.

James braced himself for round whatever this was of their argument and found his voice. “You alright, Clarkson?” he asked, trying to find a tone not off blokeish concern and contrition.

What he got in return was a gruff noise of dismissal, a kind of half cough, half sigh, and then Jez shuffling off to begin the painstaking process of burrowing into his bedroll. This was done with sullen fumbling and dreariness like an adolescent going to sulk in bed. James realized that perhaps this was a well earned snit, but that didn’t mean they actually had time for it, and they couldn’t both sit like lumps and nurse their wounded pride. 

“I’ll make dinner then, shall I?” he asked dully, a sarcastic edge creeping in despite his better intentions. How can a grown man be so useless, he found himself thinking again, especially one so mountainous tall and full of intensity in other respects, why didn’t it ever seem to resolve into anything? But instead of thinking it with a return of the rigors of fury, it came with the twin needle sting of annoyance and something disastrously like pity or protectiveness. This disaster of a man, why had both of them believed so completely in his ability to handle this trip, when very obviously, everything about the man underneath the man underneath the Clarkson persona said he wasn’t at all equipped. Sure this was a fairly violent demonstration of what happened when you started to believe your own hype. 

They were here now. James reminded himself of what Aksel had said about keeping lists of grievances and dwelling on blame. He made them an unappealing but hopefully also inoffensive and mood stabilizing dinner. They had some alcohol left but that didn’t seem like a good ingredient to add into this emotional minefield. 

He tried to ignore Jez’s morose sulking in the other half of the tent. Hopefully he’d either grow bored of it, or he would fall asleep and be more rational after a nap. Disengaging was the only sane way James had left of coping with the atmosphere. And maybe that was the right move because eventually, Jeremy was the one who broke the silence. 

“I’m not doing it on purpose, James, I hope you realize that,” he said in a subdued, hoarse voice of reasonable sincerity that almost never made it onto film, that James supposed that only he, Andy, Richard and Francie had heard lately. As a statement it could also refer to any number of things. 

James put the kettle on for tea -- they’d been warned about dehydration in the cold and wind but drinking cold water bottles or sports drinks was the least appealing idea he could think of. He wondered if he ought to take the bait or leave it, if they were heading into yet another argument. But he was curious, and Jeremy sounded serious instead of self-pitying. 

“Not doing what on purpose?” he asked, neutrally as he could. 

“This,” Jeremy said, turning onto his back and gesturing with sharp impatience at the expansive length of himself. “Me. ‘the clumsy incompetence’ thing which you spent a solid block of time yelling at me for earlier today. That. That was not comedy uselessness. I realize by the end of day two that it wasn’t successfully that funny and by day three that it was actually dangerous and anyway, by this point I don't have the spare energy for comedy cocking about antics. I’m not doing it for the cameras or to torture you -- though I know you’ll probably never believe me, and then we’ll play it up back home -- but this is my actual inability you’re ready to murder me over.”

“Not murder,” James protested, instinctively annoyed.

“Really? I haven’t seen you looking at me with that much outright hatred since before--” he cut himself off off because even this far removed from it they didn’t say the words out loud if they could help it, but James knew that he knew that he meant a hospital corridor in Leeds.

And James also knew what he meant. The six months before the Vampire crash had been badly fraught between him and Jeremy. Giddy inseparable flying highs and lows where the snapping and picking seemed endless and about to break them and the atmosphere pervasively sour enough that Hamond and Andy had both started to watch them with wary concern. It had all levelled off into a staggering, tacitly unacknowledged codependency, starting from those earliest, most terrible days of waiting. He hadn’t understood what was happening back in that before time, when they’d dragged each other along in that awful ride of highly charged ups and downs, and he certainly didn’t understand it any better now while frozen and exhausted eyes still smarting with the ice and white. 

“I don’t hate you,” said James wearily. He tried to say it like ‘I’m sorry,’ like, ‘I’m as lost as you are.’ “I haven’t ever hated you, not now and not then.”

Jeremy made a skeptical noise but didn’t protest further. 

“Look. I shouldn’t have yelled like that. I didn’t mean to, I don’t really know what came over me.”

“Alright, James,” he said. He sounded tired and defeated. He dragged his arm over his eyes as though bothered by the light or as though trying to retreat from the situation without going anywhere. 

Does he believe me? James wondered. It didn’t feel like it. And what about what Jez had said, asserting the sincerity of his inability as an inside out defence of his honour. James supposed he had known that all along. The man wasn’t known for his dexterity away from powersliding on the track, anyone who worked on the show for any length of time became aware of his limitations. Sometimes he was bashfully open about his hopelessness with tools and detail work. Other times he leaned into it with knee jerk destruction-for-a-laugh to cover for the fact that a sincere attempt wouldn’t give much more positive results or show him in a light so triumphantly careless, and then he’d have to with the sting of having cared and tried and failed where everyone could see. It was what James did, and sometimes it did sting, a bit, when it went wrong and he was teased for it, but he wasn’t wired to avoid earnestness with the same ease that Jeremy was. And he honestly found the prospect of being seen not to try his best more unappealing than alternative. If Jeremy was honestly trying and honestly faltering then that tracked with his genuinely awful misery.

It also didn’t feel like a surprise. And it was frightening, because here they were already trying as hard as they were able and still they were flailing and freezing like the damned. Probably that was why he had yelled, he was scared to death and it had to go somewhere -- and who else was he going to yell at? The film crew brave enough to follow them? Aksel and Emil who were trying to keep them from ending up dead? Or the man who had stuck by him through the better part of the last few years and the worst of the last several months and who had elevated what was essentially an absurd pub dare into a grueling reality for them all. He had blown up at him once in the wake of the accident as well, though not with the same fervour and it hadn’t even made a dent in them, quickly blown over and forgotten and Jez hadn’t even seemed to consider that he might have meant it. Not like now. 

Exhaustion made you fragile, though, and hyper sensitized. Especially when you were being prodded in your most vulnerable frailties. But he knew Jeremy better than Aksel did and he worried that an outright apology would be like needling him in a different way. Like signalling that he’d noticed the very fragility that embarrassed him.

He coaxed them through tea and coffee instead, and presented Jeremy with an extra chocolate from the secret stash -- apology without apology -- and casually ignored the way Jez spent the short evening looking chastened, heavy-eyed and subdued. 

“Alright, last time I bring this up before we never mention it again -- I still don’t understand why it bothered you so much. We’ve argued before, hell I’ve shouted at you before plenty of imes. You’ve never given me a sign that you found it anything other than amusing or maybe annoying.”

“I don’t know, James. Does it matter? The endless days, I s’ppose,” he said, voice rough and dismissive then he put aside his coffee cup and scrubbed at his brow with the side of his hand in a heart-twanging familiar gesture of frustration and weariness. “I’m not usually trying this hard when you do,” he admitted, “and you don’t usually mean it that much.”

“I didn’t. I didn’t mean it,” he insisted, letting go of any notion of pride and dignity. If Jeremy was going to confess that much, then he could do the same. “Maybe partially at that exact moment, but not the instant I walked away and came to my senses. I get quite stupidly angry when frightened.. You knew that already, right?”

“S’ppose so.”

“So I can’t absolutely promise that I won’t do it again. But I’ll try not to and you can keep in mind that it’s just… like a symptom. I don’t mean it more, ‘s just. Cold and tired and thinking of how it could kill us, you know. I don’t know. One of our helpful Icelandics came up to me earlier and he said it was good for us, kind of. Shout and bluster, apologize, burn it off and move on, rather than hoarding grievances and stewing over them.”

“I dunno, May. That sounds suspiciously reasonable,” said Jeremy. It was something like a pale reflection of his unusual humour but at least that grinding tension had gone out of him. 

“And it’ll all make for good telly of course. Can’t have one of our challenges without a measure of on screen friction and pyrotechnics.”

“No, that’s true. We’ll make it work in the edits, I’m sure. And then they’ll accuse us once again of staging drama and disaster for viewing figures.” 

He laughed wryly, knowing how painfully true that was. The skeptic conspiracy-ists could find the “signs” of fakery anywhere. And this kind of serious journey was sure to bring them out in force looking for any sign that they’d made something up or made it in any way easier for themselves than the armchair experts in their cozy sitting rooms felt was warranted. “They’re going to have a field day with this whole trip, aren’t they.”

“Yes,” said Jez with an exaggeratedly firm nod, “so you better be ready to swear blind you were ready to murder me when we get home, alright? Head those morons off before they get any ideas.”

“Right. ‘Captain Horrible’ strikes again.” and that kind of irrationality did feel like it belonged to someone else -- the alter ego characters maybe, or maybe just a frayed part of him he was almost never pushed into confronting. “Just tell me, though, alright? Up here, whether or not they’re pointing cameras at us, tell me if I’m being Captain Horrible for real and I’ll try and snap out of it. Because you need to know I don’t actually mean it. I really don’t, Jezza. No matter what it looks like in the heat of the moment.”

“Fine, I understand. You great, soft thing,” he said, but not as dismissively as his words pretended. “It’s like they kept trying to warn us. The only way to get through it is to get through it and remember we might not be entirely sane all the time.”

James hummed wearily in agreement and wanted nothing more than to sleep for a week in a warm bed. Which wasn’t going to happen in the near future. “Come on,” he said, more in hope than in expectation, “Clearing away so we can fall over time.”

**

By day six it was clear that they needn’t have worried about further blowups. No one had the energy. He heard a bit about fraying tempers in the camera crew truck as they were setting out, but by the afternoon they were all spread across the ice, stuck in different places and to varying degrees. Getting unstuck was the only thing that consumed them, any of them, making such small progress that he started wondering if they’d even be safe to hike out of the boulder field to get picked up, if it came to it. 

James would have panicked, a part of him did panic, but instead his world narrowed down to chipping away at ice with aching arms, with the hulking shape of the truck looming over him, the sound of the wind and the noises of Jeremy’s similar efforts ringing in his ears.

From time to time they rested in the Hilux, to be out of the wind for a while and thaw their hand in front of the heaters when they seemed dangerously numb, even though they could only risk it for a few minutes at a time in order to save fuel. The warnings about falling through the ice in the truck while they slept rang in his mind even as he snatched handfuls of minutes of sleep against the window in these breaks. It was like falling into the soft warmth of rest and then into frozen panic that he hadn’t chosen to sleep, that he was vulnerable, that he was falling, and then back into the dizzy nothing of sleep. Then Jez would shake and startle him awake, and even as it frustrated him to be ordered about so, it was a relief each time. To be released from such an uneasy dream state. He couldn’t even be annoyed at the demands to work -- there was every likelihood that each of the truck teams would be on their own until they all got clear of the boulder maze, and they had no idea how long that would take with such inexact maps and changing landscape. 

The second night in the boulders, there was no one to help with the tent but it didn’t lead to an argument. James didn’t really have a memory of the pseudo evening beyond staring at the pile of nylon, hoping it wouldn’t blow away and then, later, crawling over to his sleeping bag and burying his face in his pillow, with nothing in between. He was pulled out of this blankness by a hand smoothing hair from his face, rubbing, or chaffing his shoulder. He was disoriented and shivery, a fine tremor of cold and unslaked exhaustion running through him but even so he wasn’t unaware enough to think that this kind hand was Sarah, and even knowing this, he didn’t want to shy away. 

“You can’t go to sleep yet, May. You need to eat something. 4000 calories a day, remember?” said Jeremy in a soft, amused voice. 

“‘M not really hungry. Just need to sleep.”

“Hmm… I don’t think that’s true. If I can manage to stay awake to make it, you can stay awake to eat it.”

“If you made it, ‘m not sure it’ll be fit for eating,” he complained, eyes glued firmly shut with stubbornness. The hand, which he had to acknowledge belonged to Jeremy, still lay heavy and comforting on his back, settled in the sore space between his shoulder blades. 

“I promise I don’t want to see you poisoned, James. I made tea for you, you know. ‘Specially. If you don’t sit up and have it, it’ll go stone cold. No microwaves in the arctic, after all.”

“Tea?”

“Yes, James.”

For that he was willing to sit up, though it was a slow, groaning process. He found that he was still wearing his parka, even though he’d apparently changed into his tent slippers, an action of which he had no memory. He peeled himself out of the awful red gortex and draped it over his lap before accepting the steaming cup. He blinked dumbly up at Jez, wondering if he was on his way to losing his mind, with these gaps in his memory and the unexpected sight of Jeremy watching him with a surprising and benign concentration of fond concern. He hadn’t warranted that face in a while, and as much as it was pleasant and warming to be worried over, it did raise distant alarums about what kind of state he must be in. 

“I suppose I must look even rougher than I feel, hm? If i’ve earned a cup of tea without asking?” he guessed.

“Well, yes, you do, I'm sure we both do and I’m glad we weren’t supplied with mirrors. But it’s more the way you came in, didn’t seem to hear a word i said and then passed clean out. Are you alright, James?”

“Well. worn out and near crippled from hacking away out there, but I’ll be fine in a bit.”

“Really? You’re not just saying that to be… brave or something?”

He laughed at that, honest and disbelieving. “Be serious, Jezza. Brave? When have you ever known me to suffer in silence?”

“Honestly? I’d say it's a pretty even split between making us all miserable, too, with your cantankerousness and not breathing a word about what’s going on with you unless forced to. So, sorry, but I’m never really sure when to worry.”

“That’s fair enough, I suppose, but I really am alright. As much as either of us at this point.”

“Right, then. Dinner”

But it was still a struggle to get dinner down, so choked by tiredness that even this effort seemed, if not difficult exactly, unreasonably annoying. He felt Jez watching him with continuing concern or uncertainty, but James didn’t let him catch his eye, not knowing how to engage with or make sense of a solicitous and perhaps paranoid Jeremy. He didn take advantage of his unusually generous mood and let him to the clearing away without argument. Even the minute effort of leaning over his plate to eat had tired the muscles which had been angered by unusual and endless lebour, and they stretched and strained as he lay back on his bedroll. 

“Even if they’d given us a dozen of these things, I don’t believe camping pads could ever make an ice pack into a comfortable bed,” he said, wriggling down into the chilly cocoon of his sleeping bag. 

“Maybe not,” said Jeremy, continuing to shuffle and clatter indistinctly as he cleared away, “But a dozen would still be a marked improvement on two inches of misery on lumpy snow like we’ve got now.”

The description was an apt one but he was still deep asleep before long, in the blank submersion of exhaustion sleep. He was distantly aware that Jez tried to address him, a familiar voice pitched at a level that expected an answer, but whatever it was floated too far away, like communications from another world. And from then a black nothingness that yanked him down through fragments of memory and fraction of the worries that plagued him in the most rudimentary dreams. 

It felt like mere moments later when he became aware of a surprised amount of commotion around him -- the tent wuffling and whistling as it was buffeted in what seemed a monstrous wind, and Jez shaking him and saying his name with unsettling strained urgency. He blinked and tried to make sense of dreamed memory and actual memory and what Jeremy was trying to convey to him. 

“Is the tent blowing away?” he mumbled, half awake and trying to clamber upright in case they needed to flee. It was the first idea that popped into his head, though it didn’t make any kind of sense. 

“No, no, we’re secure,” said Jeremy, clamping a hand on his shoulder to keep him from bolting, “but it’s blowing pretty hard out there -- i think the weather must’ve changed, too because the temperature’s dropped.”

“How long’ve I been asleep?”

“Maybe an hour? Dunno exactly.”

“Only an hour? Christ, Jez, why’d you wake me up?”

“Because it’s gotten colder, like I said. I think we need to double up -- I can’t sleep -- you were shivering and snoring, James, how you could sleep through that I have no idea.”

He was shivering slightly, it was true, a fine juddery feeling. And it was cold. Colder even than he’d come to expect, or that’s what it felt like fresh from sleep. The tent bellied and shuddered with another gust of wind -- it was always windy but this seemed shockingly violent. James stared up at the light through the nylon and tried to decide if it was getting darker or brighter or if his eyes were just tired and dazzled.

“We brought the shovels in from the truck, didn’t we?” James asked urgently, trying to stave off the image of their tent being slowly buried by blown and falling snow in one of the vicious storms which the North could brew. Unseasonable but when had their luck ever kept them from absurdly rare disasters. 

“We have the shovels, but it’s not snowing, listen,” he flapped a hand at the tent roof, and yes there was an absence of the icey pelting that would mean precipitation. “I think it must have cleared off, which is why it’s got so cold. Come on, up.”

“Have you gotten any sleep at all? How are you this manic?” complained James, but he obeyed, accepting the chemical heat pack Jeremy shoved in his hands in return for shucking his sleeping bag off him.

“No, I haven’t slept, I can't sleep while iced over and deafened. And anyway, I didn’t want to drift off and freeze that way.”

Oh, thought James with a sympathetic pang, this isn’t mania, this is panicking, insomniac Jeremy. This was one of the main points of personality conflict, James knew. He knew that his own response to panic and stress was to try and submerge himself somewhere deep down and far away, so that he didn’t have to live in the same space, the same seconds as the thing that seemed to threaten him. And when he was sunk carefully down, he flinched away -- at times, with extreme prejudice -- away from anything that could shatter his fragile calm. Then there was Jeremy’s response to fear and stress, which nearly always involved steadily increasing volume -- and pleas for reassurance, though he would never admit that that’s what they were. These two reactions didn’t always play happily together, James had found. He often reminded himself with urgent firmness that Jezza wasn’t hounding him in order to disturb him, but because he was externalizing his own distress. 

Sometimes it was highly abrasive, alarming, intrusive distress that he couldn’t cope with on top of his own distress. Sometimes he was simply exhausting, and as James was already stretched beyond his reserves, he let himself be exhausted. He couldn’t manage to do anything besides sit like a lump and let Jeremy’s panic babble wash over him, and shiver and blink numbly as Jez wrestled with the sleeping bags. 

“I’m much colder now than I was, Jeremy,” he said, unhappy and too tired to temper it or even to work up some annoyance. 

“I know, I know, almost sorted. Only I didn’t much like the idea of freezing to death as soon as I all asleep, and they did say --”

“Alright, alright, I already agreed didn’t I?” he grabbed for his parka and clutched it around him, worried about just how much his teeth wanted to chatter. “Good god, it’s cold. Is this stupid? Should we go get in the truck and turn the heater on for a bit?”

“I don’t want to risk the fuel until the rest of the caravan catches up, with the reserve tank. I’m also not wild about us leaving the shelter we’ve got for a different shelter in this windchill, no matter how close by.”

“Oh,” he said, and then actually thought about stepping out into that weather, wondered if they’d even be able to see the Hilux or if they’d get lost in the 20 feet between there and the tent. “Good point. Let’s stay here.”

“Right. Ready, James, let’s climb in -- and never tell anyone I said that. Parkas on top… sorry in advance for manhandling you. And please, this is important, try not to elbow me in the face.”

James laughed despite himself at the melodrama. Of course Jeremy knew that he existed in a surprising exception to Jame’s touch aversion, at least in extreme circumstances of certain, non-heights-induced-terror kinds. Maybe at other times as well but they’d certainly never talked about it. And then there had been that one night in a hotel room in Leeds almost 8 months ago. They hadn’t talked about that either, but it was what he thought about as they awkwardly shuffled together into their joined sleeping bags and pile of heat reflective blankets and the parkas. 

He was clumsy from cold and generalized exhaustion. Jeremy was right to worry about his tender places. James got a couple unintended elbows in the side, without force behind them but still uncomfortable blows, and he himself had to apologize for a near-disastrously placed knee. It was awkward and unaccustomed and the sleeping bags were slither and claustrophobic. Even with Sarah he would have found it oppressive and irritating to be so jammed and hemmed in. yet -- yet, obligatory grumbling aside with a crinkling blanket over their heads, with Jeremy’s warm bulk to lean on, he felt his tense, shivering muscles starting to go lax, sleepy and soothed. The smell, even the feel of him was familiar in an unexpected way, steadying. Bolstering against the knowledge that they were the only two humans for miles, in a hostile ice field, holding onto each other so they didn’t have to face the sheer mountainous drop all around. 

*

That’s how it had been that night in the hotel. There’d been one hotel room, taken before the media descended, and they’d traded off, using it for naps and showers in between hospital shifts, waiting downstairs or pacing in the corridor when only Mindy was allowed at Hammond’s side. And then he had woken up, spoken real words, and recognized all of them, so it seemed, and was recognizably himself. It had been overwhelming -- and they’d hat to try not to overwhelm him and each other with each other and their reactions. Mindy’s endless optimism had been rewarded, and she’d comforted both of them through even this revelation -- you see, he’s coming back, of course he was always coming back, Richard’s so strong, you know this, -- sweet and slightly triumphant to have her husband prove her right.

They’d both stayed late at the hospital that night, he and Jeremy, in case Richard woke again, maybe, or because they couldn’t stand not to. He hadn’t but they’d decided that must be a good sign, too, a natural, healing sleep, rather than drug induced. No thought had been given to amiable, unobtrusive shifts between hospital and hotel. They found themselves facing up to the room door together, after a late and uninspiring hospital cafe dinner and a surprisingly emotional check in call to Andy. There was an awkwardness, though there shouldn’t have been. They’d stayed together often enough on filming jaunts, in rooms with one or two wide hotel beds. But those had been good days or frustrating days or late nights after friendly trips to the pub, pouring themselves back while careless and pleasantly submerged. 

This was forced proximity after a gauntlet of emotion and outright fear. He’d never shared a room with Jez directly after finding out that it was just as affecting to see him quietly emotional out of relief rather than anticipatory grief, but infinitely less terrifying, or after days of finding himself sinking into shock spurred vacancy from which Jeremy had sheparded him back to the unpleasant present despite how sullen and acerbic he could become in return -- the ugly unvarnished parts of himself which he had tried to avoid showing anyone, not even Sarah. Usually after ordeals like that, his instinct was to retreat, segregate himself and repair his sense of equilibrium.

James had faced facts about sharing a room with Jeremy that night with real apprehension -- the first spared on something so petty in some days which was in itself a relief in a small way -- but in the end they’d had a kind of truce. Not the fear-induced peace pact of the hospital corridors and bedside truce, but the realization of two men who used to look at each other with realm startled, manic affection that had somehow, in the past year or so, gone over sideways for reasons he suspected that neither of them understood, and had now all at once remembered that they liked -- even, maybe, needed -- each other.

There had been an awkward interlude with the television on, and the both of them sitting on the bedspread. The cheap hotel chain detergent wasn’t homey or comforting, the pillows propped against the headboard were flat and inadequate, not at all suggestive of luxury or intimacy. James thought at some point that night that it was little more than the hostelry equivalent of the hospital cafeteria or the downstairs waiting room, thin and easily punctured graciousness overtop misery and necessity. But at the same time, it wasn’t. It was another in a series of anonymous rooms where he had stayed with Jeremy like so many others over the years. In spite of the circumstances that were impossible to forget, it was more like their normal everyday lives than anything had been in what felt like months --the last few days -- profound relief in it’s own way.

Maybe that’s why, when the television proved fruitless and the prospect of playing insomnia roulette began to seem the more appealing, or at least the inevitably option, without acknowledgement or question, he found that when each of them were done with washing up and it was time to turn off the lights, they folded themselves together under the covers. Not once in the past had he been tempted to huddle close like that. Not with either of them -- and he didn’t want to wander among those thoughts, but when Rich had been unquestionably whole and hale his companionship had been equally unquestioning and easy, with none of this fury or this cling, and if the whole mess had been reversed, an image as unthinkable as the current picture that it wouldn’t fully form, James didn’t believe that this instinct for proximity would be mirrored. The shape of that friendship had always been different.

Even Sarah, he was aware and skittish to admit, he might have felt wary of on a night like that. She was so completely separate from the circus of the show. Most of the time, he felt that that made their relationship something of a refuge. He sometimes believed that he was some totally other version of himself with her, two worlds that only intersected at occasional social functions or when he complained about the latest show related argument. It was what both of them preferred, instinctively, with only a few, hedged conversations to confirm this. Sarah liked Richard, but she wouldn’t be able to join him in the extent of the fear they had lived in -- hadn’t, it was obvious, when he’d given her updates over the phone, to sympathetic concern, but. Maybe, definitely, it was unfair, but given the chance, he was not sure he'd have gone to her, not like this. 

Not like just off parenthesis, almost knee to knee, Jeremy’s long shin against his, foot nudging his, long arm heavy across his waist, draped as if by accident along the edge of the blankts, long fingers tapping and pressing against his back. James’s crown near enough to burrowing into the crook of his shoulder that he shared Jeremy’s pillow, could listen to him breathe, though there they didn’t quite touch, with a handful of soft cotton tee shirt, not his own, fisted loosely in his palm, his knuckles just brushing, now and then, the soft, vulnerably breathing side underneath. 

It was all out of character, like nothing out of the repertoire of their relationship. James wasn’t even a naturally tactile person, or tactile with things and not with other people, not even with friends. He didn’t reach out, had come to the conclusion that he’d been wired up without the need for touch that psychology told him he should crave like salt or sex because he never almost never missed or craved it. Yet this was good. Not intrusive. Didn’t make his skin twitch with claustrophobia. Instead, he was soothed in a way he hadn't been since he first got the phone call. He thought it was the same for Jeremy, he felt the tension bleed out of him like he hadn’t seen for days, James would have been miserable, he thought, circumspectly alone on his side of the mattress all night, pretending indifference, and then refused to think any further, focusing on inarticulate comfort. 

When James had been very nearly asleep, Jeremy spoke. “Brains are very, very complicated, James. Do you think… I mean. I don’t know what I mean.”

“Yes you do, go on… it’s alright to ask it, Jezza,” he mumbled. They must both have been thinking about it all night and it was silly to pretend otherwise, even though he would have resisted giving voice to it if prompted by nearly anyone else. 

“D’you think it’ll really be that simple? D’you think it could be?” asked Jeremy. His voice was high and squashed with hope and nerves. 

“No, I don’t think it will be that simple, like just waking up and flipping a switch, even for him. But he is in there, really him. We both saw that.”

“Yes… we did.”

“So. We just keep that in mind. It’s him and he’s coming back. And we see what happens next.”

‘What happens next’ was an unbelievably complex issue, including questions around nearly all permutations of their little band, the inner and outer wheels of it all pulled in and affected. There was a time that followed when it seemed that not one of them knew where they stood or what to expect, either in the holistic or the intensely personal, selfish sphere. This leant, James had thought, an extra weight of credibility to the instinct that said that this one-night-long aberration in the fabric of stoicism and blokeish reserve would never be mentioned, but would be remembered. Had secured something. The first in what would be a series of rooms, where James found that a different, parallel reality with Jeremy seemed to carry on, that intersected with ordinary life from time to time. 

*

Their tent in the arctic was another of those rooms, obscure and cramped and uncomfortable as it was, like sleeping in a billowing sail adrift on a sea of ice, both horrifying and horrifyingly intimate, an element to this mad undertaking he hadn’t even thought to worry about before they set out. The claustrophobic rustling little burrow Jeremt had prodded them into making of the bedding was even more intimate, and what’s more, something like warm. They were both muffled up with several more layers of rustling down and fleece and wicking technical fabric, but now, there, it wasn’t a matter of nervous, decorous proximity. He shouldn’t have been surprised, knowing Jeremy as he did, that he found himself clutched close, but with all the posturing of the last few days he hadn’t expected the admission, even to him. But they were alone, very very alone, and perilously close to being stranded -- an awareness that no one had voiced, with or without a camera nearby, but it hung over them. 

James supposed he should feel awkward, or trapped, he should have been making firm and disapproving noises and wriggling out of the firm, telling, grip, warning Jeremy, that he had no ambition towards being his stand in teddy bear. But he wasn’t. Jammed together like sardines, and even so, holding fast and not squirming against it. Because no one would ever know, and the menace of the ice was enough that James decided it was justified, and not a weakness. A good excuse. He curried his cold hands into the warm place under the edge of Jeremy’s fleece, work roughened fingers catching on the slippery material of his undershirt. He weighed, despite his intentions not to contemplate anything that was now happening, if this truce, and admission of closeness did anything to offset the rest of this ordeal. It wasn’t recompense for the whole awful vastness of it, but he did see he preferred this, being clutched like a talisman against an alien land, over being treated as a burden or a hectoring nag. 

This was another interlude that would never be spoken of. Certainly he would never mention to Sarah any huddling together for warmth. He wouldn't want to worry her, that’s the only way he could phrase it to make sense of his protective aversion. He would later, when facts confronted him, dissect the dual meanings or ‘making her worry,’ but it had yet to occur to him directly.

Warm and close as it was, though, it wasn’t restful. Every time James started to drift, Jeremy would flinch and jerk and yank them both back to wakefulness with inadvertent violence, pinching fingers or twitching, jarring knees. By the fourth time it happened, James was so desperate with spoiled sleep that he was near shouting or tears. He recognized the phenomenon, though, from fevers he’d had and times of extreme stress, a body that perceived enough danger that it foreswore sleep, no matter how wanted. James siged fiercely and reflected on the misery of all of it.

“Will you please try to relax,” James said, frustration and sympathy finally outweighing the ingrained decorousness that said that he should pretend not to notice the clear distress of another grown man. “It is very uncomfortable, but we’ve made it this far. If we haven’t frozen to death by this point, I don’t think we’re going to.”

“I’m sorry, James. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Maybe I should get up and look at the route plans again and let you get some sleep.”

“No, you can’t, if you get up you’ll let all the warm air out. Besides, if you don’t get some sleep you’ll pass out at the wheel and drive us into a giant boulder.”

“You could drive for a bit. S’not as though you could make us go any slower than we already are.”

“No, thank you. Don’t tell anyone I said this, but you’re better at this snow stuff. I already nearly sunk us the one time I tried. Don’t really fancy trying my luck again. My luck, Jez, think about it.”

“That’s a point,” he conceded with humour.

James felt him sigh hugely and try to shuffle even deeper down into the sleeping bags, knees encroaching farther into his space. James thought with distant surprise that this didn’t make his sense of helpless frustration worse, crowded as he was. He merely buried his face in his pillow protectively and waited out the tumult. 

“Oh, god, James, why did I drag us out here? What the hell was I thinking of?” Jeremy's voice was a difficult blend of humor and alarm, as though he'd suddenly realized where they were. 

“Well. I don’t honestly know. You tell me. Hero worshiping Sir Ranulph Fiennes? The feeling of inadequacy from knowing Hammond’s come nearer to dying on the job than us when we were too cowardly to volunteer? Or is it just because Richard wanted to and it’s just… impossible to say no to him, now?”

“That’s a little cynical,” protested Jeremy, “Fairly accurate though, I have to admit. Some out of all three columns, probably.”

“Well, we’re out here now no matter what it was. You can interrogate your philosophical choices when this is all over and we’re not turning into icicles and going mad with sleep deprivation.”

“Right.”

“You’re doing better than I thought you would though,” James admitted, prodded by the truly defeated sound of Jeremy’s voice. He realized after he said it that it sounded like damning with faint praise, but he meant it with surprisingly sentimental conviction -- they hadn't touched a drop of the gin that evening, but he was drunk and loose tongued with tiredness, and there was a reason he’d always made a point to retreat to his own corner when they’d had long projects before, not that any mere filming jaunt could compare to this. 

“Is that a compliment, or an insult?” asked Jeremy, “Because I can’t tell.”

“It’s not an insult. Or it wasn’t meant to be. We haven’t died. We aren’t hopelessly lost. We haven’t permanently fallen out, I don’t think,” said James nudging him with his shoulder significantly. “And honestly, we haven’t gone more mad than we were when we started. You haven’t caused yourself, me, or the truck any serious damage. None, in short, of the scenarios I was fully convinced would come to pass when we set out, have happened. All in all, we’re actually doing alright.”

“Jesus christ, May. Why the hell did you agree to come if you were so sure all that catastrophic disaster was going to happen?”

“I didn’t exactly keep my concerns a secret. You can’t actually be surprised.”

“I thought you were just playing it up for the cameras. Dramatic tension and humour and all that.”

“Well. I wasn’t. Exactly. It’s hard to explain. I’m not always good at judging which of my best and worst case expectations are… reasonable. In scope and scale. I can expect something will happen and still recognize that it’s not necessarily likely,” he said stumblingly, trying to explain. 

“Hmm. you’ll have to explain that to me again when my brain’s working, but I s’ppose i understand.”

“Anyway. I couldn’t let you, all of you, go off and do this without me.”

“Oh, James--”

“Stop there, don’t go all soppy on me, Clarkson. There’s a limit to how much cliche even I can take.”

“Right. Our bloke credentials are already in serious danger, aren’t they. Please feel free to take it as read, then.”

“So. are you going to get some sleep now?”

“I don’t know. If I could sleep just like that, don’t you think i would be by now?”

“It’s not like you aren’t tired. And it’s darker, under here. Is there anything else that would help? -- excluding,” he added, sensing the opening for a frustrated Clarkson rant for which he would have no patience, “anything not reasonably possible in the circumstances.”

“I dunno, James. I just… I don’t like it out here,” he said as though it was, miraculously, a surprise or a secret. 

“And this surprises you? The arctic is cold and awful, that’s a commonly known fact,” James said with exasperated fondness. 

“You came along expecting to hate it, but I didn’t. Not really.”

“That bad tempered fellow pushed you into the frozen sea to show you how bad it could be!”

“But I wasn’t planning on falling through the ice again,” he countered sharply.

“Jezza…”

“I didn’t expect to be this incompetent, alright? Not this bad,” Jeremy said in a frustrated rush, sounding pained and embarrassed, like James rarely heard from him. “I’m trying as hard as I can. This is me flat out, James, and I still might as well be messing it up for the cameras for all it’s…”

Perhaps it was easier for him to admit in the rustling dark, too close to look at each other, aimed just about into James’s shoulder. It wasn’t exactly news to him, James knew, and Jeremy had explained something similar a few days before. 

James also knew that, of the three of them, it was Jeremy that had taken all terribly seriously from day one. He’d shown a level of dangerous sincerity that he rarely allowed himself publicly about anything, especially anything that had to do with the show. Jeremy had wanted to do well. He’d wanted to prove himself impressive, or at least competent, to show that Ambitious But Rubbish had its place in entertainment television, but it wasn’t him all of the time. That he could be ridiculous but that he could earn credibility on this kind of international stage. James supposed that he’d known all along that this project had been born out of a different kind of impulse from Jeremy and Richard, something aiming a little higher, and with a greater urgency of the longing of mortal man who has been put in fear of what might become of him, who wants to make his mark. Jeremy had wanted to do something more meaningful than going around corners too fast while shouting, as he often put it. 

James often underestimated the extent of Jeremy’s self awareness, he realized with an ugly sinking feeling. He’d been doing it all trip, hadn’t he.

“I’ve been yelling at you rather a lot more than you deserve, haven’t I?” he said, quietly. 

“I can’t exactly hold it against you, can I? Some of it was perfectly well deserved, and you couldn’t tell the difference, which is… christ, that just about sums it up, doesn’t it.” He reached up to scrub at his face with the side of his hand in frustration.

It was such a familiar, tired and defeated gesture that even James’s sturdy reticence broke. He caught Jeremy’s wrist carefully in his hand before he could cause himself any real irritation, though he didn’t try to pull it away from his face. “Listen. I don’t know what to say here. Neither of us have done spectacularly well, but it’s certainly not the abject failure of manhood that you seem to be picturing. And if you let yourself actually get some rest, I’m sure the whole thing will seem less dire.”

“Really. Stranded on the ice, making yards, not miles of progress, separated from our support team, with limited fuel and supplies, in screamingly below freezing temperatures. That lot’s going to seem less dire after a few hours’ sleep.”

“Yes, actually. I think it will. Less insurmountable, anyway. Your optimism will kick back in, and you’ll remember that Andy would never have signed off on a plan that involved a greater than outside chance of your actually dying -- and if we really can’t find an end to the boulder field, we can go back to the flat and call out.”

“Give up, you mean.”

“It’s always an option. If it’s that or turning into the Franklin Expedition, then yes. But I don’t think it’ll come to that. And I am, as you delight in saying, the world's most determined pessimist, so you should take my word on this,” said James with far less feigned confidence than he expected. Maybe that’s why, seemingly, Jeremy believed him. He stopped hiding behind his hand, anyway, and some of the nervous twitching tension that had been keeping them both awake seemed to lessen. 

James found that he was, surprisingly, still gripping Jeremy's Wrist, an oddly passive object in his hand, but it was warm. It had never been his inclination to cling onto bits of his friends, but it seemed like it had helped, so he let his fingers relax, as though they just happened to be there, but he didn’t obviously snatch his hand away.

There was a long quiet, or it seemed long, with only the sound of their breathing, and the beat and wave of the wind against the tent sides, and the rustling of the reflective blanket over their heads. James began to sink into sleep again, warm and syrupy rest, almost almost submerged. All that was left of him was the ache in his muscles against the unforgiving camping mats and the soft, muffled warmth of Jeremy leaning against his side. He decided that if he was not required to move a muscle for a solid 6 hours he might honestly survive this -- nevermind any sensible internal calculation that said he’d only be allowed half that.

“You won’ tell ‘nybody, will you?” mumbled Jeremy in a boyish plea, pulling James back just far enough awake to engage his ears.

He groaned in protest, but he couldn’t ignore such an honest request. James wasn’t sure about what Jeremy was asking his discretion, his perceived failure as an adventurer, his emotionality in the face of danger, or the huddling for warmth. James wasn’t going to wade into figuring it out. “‘Course not,” he assured him, “‘n even if I did, no one would believe me.”

Whatever response he could find for that, James didn’t stay awake long enough to find out. 

*


End file.
